Texting

By Peggy | July 7, 2011 |

With the upgrade to iPhones, Sam and I can now text each other. I’ve watched Sam play with spelling and language on Facebook and knew that he could handle some communication shortcuts. I’ve watched him use some numbers in place of letters. I was curious what our first crash-and-burn would be like texting.

Our first crash and burn came from the auto-correct.

Me: “Maybe charge the tractor when you fervor from work and let’s try to start it again tonight.”

When I pressed send, I saw that “fervor” was in place of “get home”.

(Awesome guess there, by the way, Mr. Auto-Correct Editor.)

Immediately, I followed that with: “Stupid auto correct. Get home, not fervor.”

Within 30 seconds, my phone was ringing.

“Mom, I did not understand your text message AT ALL.”

I didn’t even try to explain or translate.

“Sam, please just charge the tractor. I’ll explain what happened with the text when I get home.”

Damn You, Auto Correct.

Posted in language

That All May Read

By Peggy | June 30, 2011 |

Yesterday we mailed back the digital playback machine from the Texas State Library. Sam has been a client of the Talking Books program since elementary school. Many nights the boys put in a Harry Potter book, or Hank the Cowdog, or Lemony Snicket, and fell asleep as the story unfolded.

That doesn’t really work for Sam’s life anymore. He’s working two jobs and, come fall, will be taking two classes online — just 12 more credit hours, four easy classes — and he’ll have his associate’s degree.

I bought him a Kindle two Christmases ago, in hopes that the Kindle — which has the capability of converting text to speech — would fill the gap in his life.

It helps when a textbook is available as a Kindle edition. The book can be read to him and that improves his comprehension. We can’t expect the Talking Books program to keep up with that kind of need.

But book publishers don’t want to cooperate with the e-reader formats. They likely consider what happened to the music industry as a cautionary tale. His most favorite books aren’t available, probably because the most popular authors know that where they go, is where the e-reader goes.

We’d pay for the damn books if they play nice with Kindle, which had the decency to offer text-to-speech. We’d buy another e-reader if they would quit buckling to the audio book market and enable text-to-speech.

While everyone else waits for market dominance — or, in the case of JK Rowling and PotterMore, apparently positions for the continued chaos — people like Sam can’t participate.

It just shows how little we really think about people when our vision is clouded by money.

Posted in adults with autism, language, rants

Overheard in the Wolfe House #6

By Peggy | June 30, 2010 |

Sam (turning off the electric razor): That’s it. I give up.

Peggy: Trying to get every last hair? Smooth as a baby’s bottom? [pause]. That’s an analogy Sam.
Sam: No it isn’t. That’s a simile. [launches into a detailed explanation of the difference between the two, with examples.]
Peggy: Thanks, Sam.
Posted in language, What Sam says

Question authority

By Peggy | June 12, 2010 |

I’m on the hook for two presentations at the Texas Parent-to-Parent conference in San Marcos June 24-26. In one presentation I’ll be working with Shahla Rosales, a professor of applied behavior analysis at the University of North Texas, on ethics in treatment decisions. She’s come up with six guideposts for clinicians. She shared them with me a year ago and they resonated so wonderfully for me, as a parent, that I proposed we offer the same talk for parents at P2P.

I’m so lucky that she said yes.
I’ll be teeing up the talk, sharing some of those school-of-hard-knocks stories that seem to define the world of parents who have children with disabilities. I’ll focus on some of the hazards in our attitudes and fallacies of thinking. Shahla encouraged me to key in on one common fallacy of reasoning that clinicians bring to the table with treatment decisions — appealing to the wrong authority.
Treatment choices should be evidence-based, but not all evidence is created equal, Shahla reminded me. Parents are sometimes in a better position to vet the rigor of evidence simply by questioning its authority with clinicians. Simply put, ask them to explain it to you.
Case in point: when Sam first began receiving services in preschool (I shared this story in my book), I was lost during an ARD/IEP meeting that went over test results. The speech therapist said that Sam could not touch his nose when he was asked. I asked her why that was important. From my perspective, as a young mom, I knew Sam “couldn’t do” things. That was why we were there in the first place. The teachers and therapists developed an exhaustive list of things Sam wasn’t doing, which did me no good. I could have written the list out for them and saved them a lot of time. But I asked the therapist to explain why he wasn’t doing some of those things, and was stunned when she couldn’t answer me.
Of course, she was embarrassed.
She followed through, however. She called up a former professor and called me several days later with the answer.
She said that most young children learn words from context. If you point out the zit on your nose, talk about blowing your nose, get a tissue to wipe your nose, or bump your nose on the door, and make some drama over that, most children learn that “nose” belongs to that sticking-out thing on your face. I recognized that Sam needed to be told things directly to learn them. After that telephone conversation, I stuck a computer label identifying dozens of things in the house for Sam. I also made him a shoe box full of vocabulary cards.
That and other direct interventions helped his early vocabulary explode.
I try to remember to be brave and ask questions and have things explained to me, because it never fails in creating a better environment for learning.
The hippies got that one right: question authority.
Posted in decision-making, language

Kindle for special readers

By Peggy | May 8, 2010 |

Sam is finishing his second all-online computer class this semester, Introduction to Database, a class for which he had two versions of the textbook — traditional and Kindle.

He was slow to warm to the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader that I bought him for Christmas, but by the end of the semester, his study routine depended heavily on two key features — “text-to-speech” and “search this book.”
By the middle of the semester, he got in the habit of starting each tutorial with the Kindle reading the opening scenario and concepts to him. When he got to the working steps of the tutorial, he went back to the textbook, so he could slow the pace down.
We found that to be one of the disadvantages of the text-to-speech feature. You have to turn it off in order to navigate around the book.
[I can see why the Kindle was abandoned by some universities that were trying it out — accessibility problems and some publishers holding onto reading rights (um, publishers, let’s differentiate between that and performance rights, ok?)]
When Sam got to the end of a tutorial or unit, he used the search to hunt down passages to evaluate true/false or multiple choice questions on his quizzes. His quizzes were timed — he had an hour to answer 20 questions — so the Kindle had the potential to get him to the right spot quickly.
Occasionally a quirky search result made us wonder if a low battery affected the power of the search.
After several tutorials, the professor provided a long list of prompts that went back through three or four chapters in order to prepare for the exam. Sam has long been accustomed to using indices and glossaries, but I watched him use the Kindle to make quick work of those searches, too.
One note of caution: the reader who is spatially oriented won’t like how the search-the-book feature drops you into the middle of a passage without any sense of where you are in the book. Locations are numbered. There is nothing in the margins of the screen that specify the chapter, page number or any other context, unless you happen to fall below a heading of some kind.
Along the way, I showed him how to use other features — highlighting and annotating. Sometimes, a concept was better understood by highlighting the the topic sentence of several consecutive paragraphs.
And sometimes, I could explain a concept better than the author, so I inserted an annotation. Sam is smart, and most of the concepts are explained plainly and directly, but not always.
We writers that think we are being crystal clear with our explanations find out how sorry our directions are with readers like Sam.
For example, in the guidelines for designing a database, the first recommendation is “identify all the fields needed to produce the required information.” Translation: make a list of the fields. Next, “organize each piece of data into its smallest useful part” and “group related fields into tables.” Translation: break up any fields that can be made smaller, then sort them.
I really couldn’t translate the concept of “putting common fields in each table.” At that point we had to draw a lot of pictures and work with a lot of examples.
Which, by the way, the Kindle needs a drawing tool.
[Sam never liked writing in his books, since he always wanted to sell them back at the end of the semester. I’ve learned that computer majors and music majors experience obsolescence in their disciplines at a different pace.]
With charts, the Kindle also comes up short. The text-to-speech feature doesn’t read them. And they enlarge only one level (you have to position the cursor over them until the plus-sign appears in order to enlarge them.) If Sam hadn’t had the book, he wouldn’t have been able to complete some of the later assignments, because the book asked him to copy code in the chart.
The embedded dictionary is a powerful feature. Early in the semester, Sam needed a lot of the early vocabulary defined for him. With previous courses, he often skimmed past unknown words hoping he’d get the context eventually. I could see the point — everything is moving so fast if you spend too much time looking up words you’re scared of getting even further behind.
I don’t think professors realize how much new vocabulary they throw at their students at the beginning of the semester.
All in all, though, Sam said he’ll be looking for Kindle versions of next year’s textbooks. It was a powerful tool. He recognized it’s power when I first showed it to him, and was almost afraid of it (he called the dictionary “addictive”), so if you plan on introducing it to your special reader, go slow at first. Look for teachable moments, they’ll come.
I knew we were good when I borrowed it one morning and had to promise to have it back by that afternoon.
Posted in adults with autism, language, self-advocacy

Do you want to be my friend?

By Peggy | April 27, 2010 |

Those who’ve read See Sam Run may remember the passage that alludes to Eric Carle’s book, “Do You Want to Be My Friend?” Classic children’s books were a big part of fostering Sam’s language development as a preschooler. That little mouse was persistent, and Sam liked the repetitive language.

Until he became a teenager and adult, however, it was never very clear to me what friendships meant to Sam. They seemed to matter, but the attachments weren’t quite like the attachments his brother and sister developed with their friends. Sam was fortunate in that the elementary school counselor fostered friendships that ended up carrying Sam through much of his middle and high school years. I saw, over time, that friendships have always been important to Sam. He adores his friends.
On his Facebook page, I’ve seen many of the same names from those early circles, plus a lot of new names. He enjoys being on Facebook and feeling connected to people.
But in daily life, the social activities — movies, bowling, games — have really dropped off since high school. Many of his high school chums are graduating college and getting on with adult things — getting jobs, apartments, moving away. I know that is as it should be.
Since Sam is a student at a community college and not a traditional, four-year school, his opportunities for a rich social life are limited. He takes advantage of many that TRIO offers, but that’s about it.
Adult life brings new circles of people, and new possibilities of friendships. He has a devoted circle of friends at Riding Unlimited, and a small circle of friends from our community. A co-worker invited him to come along to the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival, an invitation Sam had to turn down because of a school conflict. Sometimes they go to lunch together.
Humans are not lone creatures like hawks, or eagles, or foxes, or polar bears. We’re more like goats, or sheep, or horses — we’re herd animals. We need connections to survive, and to thrive.
As adults, making connections — well, we’re not very imaginative about it. We befriend people like us. After you get married, for example, you make friends with other couples. After you have a baby, all your new friends are other couples with babies. Friendships with people who aren’t exactly like us take a little more thought and consideration.
I know there are support groups that could help Sam and others like him make friends, expanding their social life. We’ve been to a few. But, they are so far removed from his daily life, they might as well be in Katmandu. In my dream world, everyone meets someone like Sam at some point in their life and decides this person is someone to include in their circle of friends.
In the final analysis, it only requires a little imagination, it’s not difficult at all to be Sam’s friend.
Posted in hope, language, social life